Just Thought You'd Like to Know . . .

In Paris, it was reported that male cab drivers dressed as women to attract riders -- the year was 1907.

On This Day in 1930 the Music of Broadway was Blessed . . .

On this day a young Stephen Sondheim (shown above)celebrated his birthday -- he was born on March 22, 1930 and Broadway would forever be grateful.

Avanti Design -- How Could We Forget ??

On March 22, 1961, industrial designer Raymond Loewy made this sketch of a futuristic sports car at the request of Sherwood Egbert, the recently appointed president of the ailing Studebaker Corporation. Egbert charged Loewy to design a new car bold enough to capture the popular imagination and boost the company's sagging fortunes. Loewy and his team of designers produced a prototype in record time, and the Avanti debuted in the spring of 1962 to rave reviews.

A series of production problems stalled distribution of the popular model, however, and the Studebaker Corporation discontinued its production in October 1963. In 1965, Nathan Altman and Leo Newman formed the Avanti Motor Corporation and began producing the car in the former Studebaker plant in South Bend, Indiana.

Grand Canyon Avenue

GRAND CANYON, AZ - MARCH 20: VIP's and members of the media and the Hualapai tribe take a preview walk on the Skywalk, billed as the first-ever cantilever-shaped glass walkway extending 70 feet from the western Grand Canyon's rim more than 4,000 feet above the Colorado River, on March 20, 2007 on the Hualapai Reservation at Grand Canyon, Arizona. The building of the Skywalk on Hualapai Indian tribal land 90 miles downstream from Grand Canyon National Park has stirred controversy with some tribal elders and environmentalists who have condemned it as a desecration of a sacred American landscape. The $40 million glass and steel platform will open to the public on March 28 when visitors will be allowed to take the lofty walk at a cost of $25 per person plus the cost of a Grand Canyon West entrance package, a total of about $75.
(David McNew / Getty Images)

Elegance and Character

The recently restored lobby of the U. S. Grant Hotel in San Diego. The 1910 hotel's comfortable yet elegant lobby, home to afternoon tea, reflects its past and its present. Stately columns are capped with a gilded-plaster flourish, including a signature G, while the carpet incorporates the evening primrose, the tribal flower of the property's new owners, the Sycuan Band of the Kumeyaay Nation, a Native American Tribe.
(Don Bartletti / LAT)

Erasing a line drawn in the sand

In two weeks, Manhattan Beach city leaders and residents plan to gather at a small park by the ocean to lift the veil from a commemorative plaque, revealing a piece of little-known local history.

"This two-block neighborhood was home to several minority families and was condemned through eminent domain proceedings commenced in 1924," the plaque reads. "Those tragic circumstances reflected the views of a different time."

After debate last summer, the City Council voted to rename the park Bruce's Beach, acknowledging the African American couple who bought the land overlooking the Pacific in 1912.

There, Charles A. and Willa Bruce created one of the few places in Southern California where black families could swim and relax along its sun-bathed shores. They ran an inn called Bruce's Lodge, a cafe and a dance hall.

By the mid-1920s, city leaders contended that the land occupied by the Bruces' resort would better serve the community as a public park. The city used its powers of condemnation to buy the land from the Bruces and other nearby residents, removing most of Manhattan Beach's African American residents and visitors.

No park was built there for three decades.

Manhattan Beach is best known for its wide sandy beaches that draw visitors from throughout the region. Cyclists glide along the Strand, past multimillion-dollar residences and well-kept gardens thick with roses. Tourists flock to the city's upscale restaurants and bars.

The city of 30,000 remains predominantly white — 89% in the latest census. Just 0.6% of its residents are black, only a small increase since 1970.

Robert L. Brigham, a historian who researched the story of Bruce's Beach, moved to Manhattan Beach from Los Angeles in 1939 at age 12 with his middle-class parents. He recalled riding through the city by bus and wondering why two blocks of seaside land sat barren, pockmarked with weeds and empty Coca-Cola bottles.

"I said to some of the adults, 'Why is it?' " said Brigham, 79. "They would put me off, saying, 'You don't want to know,' or 'You're too young' or 'I don't know.' "

Years later, as a Cal State Fresno graduate student in history, he set out to write his master's thesis on Bruce's Beach and returned to his hometown to ask old-timers the same question. Why is that land still vacant?

"There's a kind of tension," he said, "between people who are very conscious of the history of Bruce's Beach and those who would rather forget about the whole thing."

Brigham, who taught at Mira Costa High School for 38 years, learned that Willa Bruce bought the land in 1912 and that she opened the resort with her husband. Beachgoers flocked there from fast-growing black communities in Los Angeles. A few other black families built homes nearby.

"You would take the Red Car down to the beach and spend a day on the beautiful beach or rent a room if you desired," Miriam Matthews, Los Angeles' first black librarian, said in an essay prepared for the California African American Museum. The resort hosted Sunday school gatherings and families, and "if one tired of the sand and surf, the parlor was available for listening to music or dancing."

White resentment festered.

Beachgoers would find the air let out of their car tires, Brigham wrote in his 1956 thesis. Local members of the Ku Klux Klan tried to set fire to the resort's main building. Someone burned a cross nearby. White residents roped off the sands to keep blacks away.

Eleven years after the resort opened, city officials started condemnation proceedings, and its buildings were razed in 1927. The Bruces received $14,500.


Nearly 50 years after Brigham finished his thesis, Alison Rose Jefferson, a master's candidate in historic preservation at USC, read a Los Angeles Times column about Bruce's Beach. Her interest piqued, she tracked down Brigham's thesis and delved deeper, uncovering a cache of old photographs at the Los Angeles Public Library.

"It's the whole idea of these middle-class people who were African American, figuring out how to take part in the California dream," Jefferson said. Now an associate historian at Historic Resources Group, a consulting firm, Jefferson is writing her master's thesis on the region's black recreation spots in the Jim Crow era.

Grappling with the story has not been easy for the city, Jefferson said later. "It requires that they need to do some thinking about the history of the community. And it also requires that they do some soul-searching for themselves as well."

Article by Deborah Schoch, Los Angeles Times Staff Writer

The "Dancing House"

by Frank Gehry, Prague, Czech Republic, 2004.

Irena Sendler: a Hero without Glory in Her Mind but not Ours

Poland's Senate unanimously passed a resolution honoring Irena Sendler, who saved nearly 2,500 Jewish children from the Nazis by organizing a ring of 20 people to smuggle them out of the Warsaw Ghetto in baskets and ambulances.

The resolution also honors the Council for Assisting Jews, of which her ring of mostly Roman Catholic members was a part.

Sendler, now 97 and living in a Warsaw nursing home, was too frail to attend but sent a letter read by Elzbieta Ficowska, one of the children she rescued.

It said, in part: "Every child saved with my help … is the justification of my existence on this Earth, and not a title to glory."

The Magic of Patagonia

Mt. Fitzroy, Argentina

Gorgeous hunk of Italian swank

The Maserati Quattroporte is the most beautiful, best-handling super-sedan on the planet. This effortlessly gorgeous hunk of Italian swank, this sinister spark from coachbuilder Pininfarina's grinding wheel, ignites envy and major car-jealousy wherever it lands. To drive one is to know the feeling of Roman senators plotting against you. Big and inexpressibly masculine, broad and low, with a rising rhythm from nose to tail and perfect isometric tension, the QP has a self-possession and –lan that makes its six-figure, four-door competitors — Mercedes-Benz AMG S-class, Audi S8, BMW 760Li — look like prison dentistry.

Stardust casino now just a memory

LAS VEGAS -- The Stardust is now just a memory.

The casino-hotel on the Las Vegas Strip was imploded early today in a hail of fireworks to make way for Boyd Gaming Corp.'s $4.4 billion megaresort Echelon.

The casino opened July 2, 1958, billing itself as the world's largest resort hotel with 1,032 rooms. It was credited with being Las Vegas' first mass-market casino, thanks to cheap rates and loss-leading food and drinks.

Bob Boughner, Echelon Resorts' chief executive, said while the Stardust was a favorite of the nostalgia crowd, it was missing out on younger patrons and those who come to Las Vegas for conventions.

For many, the Stardust represented the most accessible place to stay in a city that gives VIP treatment to the biggest gamblers. But the concept of discounting rates to keep people coming is rapidly fading from the Las Vegas Strip as many casinos nowadays make more revenue from hotel rooms, clubs, shows and cuisine than from gambling.

The implosion turned a 32-story tower, gutted to its barest concrete and steel over the past three months, into the tallest building ever felled on the Strip.

LVI Services Inc. used 428 pounds of explosives to destroy the casino's two towers. Twenty water cannons sprayed the dust cloud, which blanketed the area in gray ash, and the main drag of the 24-hour gambling mecca was temporarily shut down.

The clean up of the site was expected to take up to two months.

Over the past two decades, the property's luster began to fade. "Lido de Paris," the showgirl extravaganza that starred illusionists Siegfried and Roy for more than a decade, wrapped up in 1991 after a 32-year run.

Crooner Wayne Newton brought nostalgia back to the aging clientele in 2000 but called it a wrap in April 2005.

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An Amazing Tree House

Hubcap House

Amazing House Paint

Foggy Glow and the Golden Gate

Fog looms over the Golden Gate Bridge as seen from Fort Baker near Sausalito. The northern end of the bridge is the site of a fog warning station at Lime Point.
(Luis Sinco / LAT)

Drama by the Bay

John Cantwell, a ranger with the National Park Service, holds his hat as gusty winds buffet the lighthouse on Alcatraz Island in San Francisco Bay.
(Luis Sinco / LAT)

Fading Beacons of Light

Dusk descends on the Point Bonita lighthouse. The structure, built in 1854, is perched on an eroding rocky outcropping of the Marin Headlands and accessible by a corroding suspension bridge that would cost more than $1 million to repair, according Paul Batlan, a realty specialist with the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
(Luis Sinco / LAT)

America's First Travel Agent

Beginning March 15, the British Museum in London will exhibit more than 70 of White's paintings to coincide with the 400th anniversary of the first permanent English settlement in the New World, at Jamestown in Virginia.

The Legend Lives On

Even 500 years after his death, Cesare Borgia speaks to us about power and politics. Cesare Borgia was the personification of Renaissance decadence and treachery. He and his family have inspired poems, operas, novels and movies.
Pinturicchio's portrait of Lucrezia Borgia (maybe) as Santa Catterina d'Alessandria disputing with the philosophers before Emperor Maximian in the Sala dei Santi in the Borgia apartments of the Vatican. The beautiful Lucrezia, sister of Cesare may (or may not) have also been his lover.